Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung

Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung

Mann examines Nietzsche's philosophy after the catastrophe of National Socialism. He traces the tension between Nietzsche's gentle, devout beginnings and his celebration of strength, cruelty and life beyond morality. Through Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Dionysus and Oscar Wilde, he follows the struggle between aesthetic beauty and ethical responsibility. He confronts Nietzsche's relation to fascism, draws out the socialist elements of his thought, and ends by asking what a new humanism might preserve from his tragic example.

1. 0:00 — Returning to Europe
2. 4:29 — Nietzsche, Hamlet and tragic compassion
3. 7:58 — The little pastor and the young scholar
4. 10:07 — Genius, illness and the Cologne encounter
5. 16:55 — Suffering, inspiration and Zarathustra
6. 21:12 — Christianity and the passion of criticism
7. 23:49 — The unity of Nietzsche’s thought
8. 25:21 — Life, culture and the enemies of instinct
9. 27:37 — History, forgetting and powerful illusions
10. 31:10 — Dionysus, morality and Oscar Wilde
11. 36:06 — The saint behind the immoralist
12. 40:29 — Two errors: instinct, intellect and morality
13. 43:23 — Democracy, Christianity and human sacrifice
14. 45:43 — War, barbarism and the Übermensch
15. 49:18 — Nietzsche and fascism
16. 52:20 — Socialism, Europe and the world to come
17. 55:57 — Aestheticism and the art of reading Nietzsche
18. 59:02 — Freedom, Germany and self-destruction
19. 1:03:31 — Towards a new humanism

Thomas Mann — 2 recordings in the archive.

Related reading: Essays 1945–1955 by Thomas Mann.

Mr President of the Confederation, ladies and gentlemen, time is precious. No one could exhaust the subject of Nietzsche in an hour anyway, and it is very warm as well. But you will understand my wish to preface my lecture with at least a few words of joy and emotion at being able to feel the old soil of Europe beneath my feet again, to breathe its intellectual air again, and once more to feast my eyes on its landscapes and its cityscapes steeped in history, as I first experienced a few days ago in England. For nine years I have lived over there in the vast young world: a lovable world, in some ways a magnificent and humanly engaging one, whose citizen I have become. But I have never ceased to feel European, nor could I ever cease to do so. And whenever I thought of Europe and spoke of Europe, I really meant Switzerland. I may as well admit it. Understandably so: for five years after I lost Germany, this small country, swept by the winds of the world, this city of Zurich, granted me protection, freedom and peace to work. I have never forgotten it. In my heart I have always thanked it and wished to see it again. Ladies and gentlemen, there were years when the fulfilment of that wish seemed very doubtful, partly because of a threatening illness that overtook me. But we have survived, Switzerland and I. And a third survivor has brought us together. It gave me the outward occasion for this journey and offers me my first opportunity to address a Swiss audience again. It is the international PEN Club, which is holding this year's world congress in Zurich. And where could it more fittingly hold it than on Swiss soil? It is more, far more, than a mere association representing the interests of poets, essayists and novelists of the Old and New Worlds. It represents a vision, an outlook. One might well call it a Swiss outlook: the idea of a free community of nations, of cooperation and equal rights, of unfettered thought, of a peaceful world, a socially just world that might be freed from avoidable suffering, suffering not ordained by God. In short, in an age of upheaval and a crisis of adjustment, it represents the idea of humanity. Indeed, of a new humanism that may be taking shape,…